Introduction

More Alaska voters than ever are voting by mail or in early voting this year. This page tracks the numbers as reported by the state.

The data come from the Alaska Division of Elections website It’s a 10-page pdf, so I ran a script using tabula-py to extract the data. Additional summary information is available here.I have republished the data here, where you can download the reports from each day. I had a google sheet that was updating automatically, but that kept breaking. Other caveats: this involves getting reports from all across the state, so there are probably reporting delays.

If you see any errors, contact Ben Matheson. Disclaimer - this may not be fully accurate or up to date. It also may break at any time. This is not official or affiliated with anything…enjoy!

Statewide Ballots Sent, Received, and Rejected

Mail Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Received Percent Received Mail Ballots Rejected
112,628 35,717 31.71% 128

Note: these numbers should match what the state has published here.

Vote By Mail per Alaska House District

Early Voting

Early voting started Monday, October 19th. The latest report, issued Monday morning, does not have any of the inperson data.

Mail Ballots Sent to Voters, Received by State, and Rejected

District Number District Ballots Received Ballots Sent Mail Ballots Rejected
28 South Anchorage 1835 5903 4
33 Downtown Juneau/Douglas/Haines/ Skagway 1567 4818 8
14 Eagle River/Chugach State Park 1459 4153 8
24 Anchorage - Oceanview 1417 4318 4
21 West Anchorage 1336 4107 3
27 Anchorage - Basher 1305 3867 1
26 Anchorage - Huffman 1243 4054 3
20 Anchorage - Downtown 1219 3592 3
22 Anchorage - Sand Lake 1193 3773 0
34 Mendenhall Valley 1169 3794 6
18 Anchorage - Spenard 1165 3532 7
04 Western Fairbanks 1155 3359 2
16 Anchorage - College Gate 1129 3200 1
25 Anchorage - Abbott 1124 3594 2
31 Homer/South Kenai 1059 4003 8
35 Sitka/Petersburg 960 3114 8
17 Anchorage - University 950 2954 0
06 Eielson/Denali/Upper Yukon/Border Region 884 2314 0
12 Chugiak/Gateway 868 2815 2
11 Greater Palmer 863 2547 5
13 Fort Richardson/North Eagle River 859 2439 3
23 Anchorage - Taku 859 2830 6
05 Chena Ridge/Airport 832 2569 4
30 Kenai/Soldotna 817 2651 4
09 Richardson Hwy/East Mat-Su 806 2422 4
10 Rural Mat-Su 748 2622 0
01 Downtown Fairbanks 721 2028 2
32 Kodiak/Cordova/Seldovia 711 2248 2
19 Anchorage - Mountainview 699 2014 2
36 Ketchikan/Wrangell/Metlakatla/Hydaburg 674 2086 5
15 Elmendorf 669 2054 5
29 North Kenai 623 2898 2
07 Greater Wasilla 613 2130 3
08 Big Lake/Point Mackenzie 609 2086 4
03 North Pole/Badger 527 1572 1
02 Fairbanks/Wainwright 486 1420 1
37 Bristol Bay/Aleutians/Upper Kuskokwim 238 1101 3
38 Lower Kuskokwim 133 601 0
39 Bering Straits/Yukon Delta 107 486 1
40 Arctic 59 507 1
99 NA 27 53 0

Time Series of Mail Ballots

I have data begining October 14th. This should show how ballots come in as more ballots come in each day.

Breakdown by House District

Voter Registration and Voter Turnout

For each Alaska House district, I have the number of registered voters (as of October 3, this report). You can see which districts are seeing more take-up of mail voting relative to their voter base. Additional this compares the 2020 completed mail ballots to the full 2016 election turnout. This is not really finished yet.

About

The Alaska Division of Elections data is originally is published in a 10-page PDF that I parsed to extract the data. This uses a combination of R and Python. The Python uses Tabula to pull out the data. After that, an R script cleans out extra spaces, gaps, and labels the rows by house district and adds descriptions. I wanted to do everything in R, but I couldn’t get rJava loaded for the Tabulizer, so the tabula-py library ended up being more expedient.

This page is an RMarkdown document that calculates some summary stats, like percent rejected and then displays the data in several ggplot2 plots. The PDF parsing in particular may be brittle and this could definitely break at anytime.